Major Manet exhibition coming – to your local cinema

Manet: Portraying Life
In cinemas from May 2

Living at the bottom of the world means unless we travel lots we miss the blockbuster art shows which show regularly at the National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris or MOMA in New York. But no more.

Manet: Portraying Life, a huge show focusing on the artist's portraits, finished showing at the Royal Academy in London a few days ago. But thanks to an innovative production company the exhibition will be on our screens this month.

Featuring Tim Marlow, who has fronted a number of art shows screened on British TV, the film replaces the hour and a half stroll around the gallery with a leisurely view of the show without having to queue and be jostled by others.

It follows on from the highly successful presentation Leonardo Live, which brought the National Gallery London sold-out blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition to more than 1000 cinemas worldwide.

The EXHIBITION series of films will feature the world's foremost art exhibitions and later in the year there will be films of exhibitions of work by Munch and Vermeer.

Pioneering global distribution company By Experience, which has been responsible for Metropolitan Opera's The Met: Live in HD and Great Britain's National Theatre Live, will handle the cinema distribution to its vast global network of movie theatres, performing arts centers, universities and other venues worldwide.

The film doesn’t just cover the exhibition's paintings. It also deals with important questions addressed by experts. What lies behind the exhibition creatively and technically? What does this collection of paintings and objects reveal about the artist or the particular historical period?

It is part-documentary, part-audio guide but for much of the time the camera just shows us the work without interference of someone talking or cut ways to other paintings. 

Manet: Portraying Life shows how the artist can be regarded as the first modernist, who challenged the French Academy’s rules with such radical compositions as Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.

He is not so well known as a portrait artist. Yet for his contemporaries it was often the portraits that made the greatest impact, with The Railway (1873), shown at the Paris Salon of 1874 anticipating Impressionist paintings such as Monet’s Gare St Lazare.

He painted many of the great names of the Second Empire and early Third Republic, including Zola, and these provide an insight into Manet’s own world and the capital’s bourgeoisie society. Each portrait – family members, fellow artists, musicians, actors, actresses, politicians or art critics – adds something to our understanding of the artist.

Various aspects of Manet’s work are discussed by the co-curators of the exhibition, such as his mastery of black and white and the influence of Diego Velázquez.

This handling of black, however, sets him apart from the impressionists, many of whom eschewed using it as it was considered a non-colour.

This is undoubtedly a significant project of enabling major art exhibitions to gain the widest possible audience through the wonders of the big screen.

Exhibition: Munch
In cinemas from August 8

Exhibition: Vermeer
In cinemas from November 21